Seeking a Mideast Path, Bush Offers a Nudge

Tuesday

Nov 27, 2007 at 5:22 AM

President Bush may be repeating Bill Clinton’s role in the peace process, yet he rejects what he sees as the meddlesome quality of it.

WASHINGTON, Nov. 26 — It might seem, after nearly seven years of deliberate detachment from Arab-Israeli peace negotiations, that President Bush has plunged into Middle Eastern diplomacy with Clintonesque energy.

He met with the Israel and Palestinian leaders at the White House on Monday and will do so again on Wednesday. On Tuesday, he will meet them at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., along with delegations from 46 countries and international organizations (including, after an arm-twisting by phone last week, Saudi Arabia).

In fact, Mr. Bush and his aides still deplore what they view as President Clinton’s disastrously hands-on involvement in the peace process in 2000. And they insist that Mr. Bush does not intend to negotiate personally the two-state peace he has pronounced as his vision, just as they insist that this is not an 11th-hour effort to forge a legacy other than the one left by the Iraq war.

“The United States cannot impose our vision,” Mr. Bush told the Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, in the Oval Office on Monday, before saying, and sounding, again, Clintonesque, “but we can help facilitate.”

For all the pomp of the Annapolis gathering, the White House is not calling it a summit meeting or anything else suggestive of substantive progress. Mr. Bush’s vision is ambitious, but his strategy is cautious — he may be repeating Mr. Clinton’s role, yet he rejects what he sees as the meddlesome quality of it.

That view reflects more than just his personality. (“The president is not a gambler,” his press secretary, Dana M. Perino, said last week.) It also echoes a view held by conservatives in the administration, and probably by Mr. Bush, that the United States should not impose terms on Israel, America’s closest ally in a troubled region.

“They’re extremely cautious because they’re exposed in that sense,” Martin S. Indyk, a former ambassador to Israel who worked in the Clinton administration, said of Mr. Bush and his aides, and of the inevitable comparisons to Mr. Clinton’s final push for peace as his term neared an end. “They don’t think it’s a good idea to drive it to a conclusion.”

As a result, Mr. Bush has given every indication that once the diplomats leave Wednesday, he will again leave any talks to come to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and, more important, to the Israelis and Palestinians.

“We have said from the very beginning, and the president made clear, that it is the parties themselves that have to make the peace,” the national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, said on the eve of this week’s meetings.

Even before the two sides — or three sides, or 49 sides — meet Tuesday, critics have declared Mr. Bush’s Annapolis gathering the photo opportunity that Ms. Rice emphatically said it would not be only a month ago.

“The mother of all photo ops,” an Israeli official called it on Monday, underscoring the fact that when it comes to Middle East peace, skepticism is always in order.

That, however, does not necessarily mean that it will be a failed photo op. Mr. Bush’s approach has resulted in the first international conference on the Arab-Israeli conflict since the Madrid conference organized by his father’s secretary of state, James A. Baker III, in 1991.

The real measure of Annapolis, officials on all sides agreed, will be what happens afterward. That almost certainly will depend on how much political capital Mr. Bush’s administration is willing to spend when the two sides reach another impasse on the difficult “final status” issues like the future of the border, the capital and Palestinian refugees.

Mr. Bush is expected to give at least a preliminary answer to that question when he opens Tuesday’s meeting with a speech that has taken on greater significance in recent days, as the Israelis and Palestinians have struggled to agree even on a general statement that might emerge from the conference.

During a toast at a formal dinner at the State Department on Monday evening, Mr. Bush promised “my personal commitment” to what has become the White House mantra since 2002: two states, Israeli and Palestinian, living side by side in peace and security.

Mr. Bush’s aides often point out that in 2002 he was the first American president to declare support for a Palestinian state. That is true, but they fail to mention that he did so while refusing to negotiate with Yasir Arafat, then the Palestinian leader, effectively endorsing a deadly stalemate.

A recurring criticism of Mr. Bush is that he has so clearly tilted American policy toward Israel that the United States is no longer seen as an honest broker, emphasizing Israel’s security over Palestinian grievances.

That was the case in 2004, when he publicly expressed support for some of the nonnegotiable positions of the former Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, including Mr. Sharon’s objections to what Palestinians regard as the all-important right of return for Palestinians uprooted by the conflict. Mr. Bush’s assurances to Israel remain on the table.

An even more consistent criticism, though, has been that Mr. Bush failed to follow through, declaring a vision only to let it wither on the vine as the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians worsened.

“This is not a slogan,” said Dennis Ross, the Middle East envoy for Mr. Clinton and the current president’s father. “If you’re going to do Middle East peace process, you can’t just lay out a broad vision.”

Mr. Bush’s aides bristle at the suggestion that he has not been effectively engaged, noting that it was the president who proposed the Annapolis conference back in July. Ms. Perino, the press secretary, suggested Monday that circumstances in Israel and the Palestinian territories had changed, with both now having leaders willing to negotiate.

Privately, officials also express confidence that the Arab world might finally get behind the effort out of fear of Iran’s rising influence in the region.

Mr. Bush, for now, seems to have accepted the argument that the Palestinian cause is at the root of Islamic mistrust of the United States — or at least that resolving the Middle East conflict could halt the march of Hamas, the radical Islamic group.

To conservatives, that might be Mr. Bush’s biggest gamble: risking a failed peace effort that would lead to greater radicalization.

“If the conference fails, it doesn’t leave you in equipoise,” said John R. Bolton, who served as the United Nations representative under Mr. Bush until last year and is now a vocal critic of the administration. “It could put you in a worse position.”